The place that the Qurʾan variously refers to as: - the ‘masjid al-ḥarām’ [the ‘forbidden’ or ‘sacred’ ‘place of prostration’], - the ‘sacred/ancient House’ or (in the Divine Voice) ‘My’ House, - the ‘maqāmi Ibrāhīm’ [‘the station...
moreThe place that the Qurʾan variously refers to as:
- the ‘masjid al-ḥarām’ [the ‘forbidden’ or ‘sacred’ ‘place of
prostration’],
- the ‘sacred/ancient House’ or (in the Divine Voice) ‘My’ House,
- the ‘maqāmi Ibrāhīm’ [‘the station of Abraham’] and
- the ‘Kaʿbah’,
is, depending upon the context, the past or longed-for Jerusalem temple or else the land upon which the temple once stood.
This view (‘the Jerusalem thesis’) accords with the overall structure, biblical subtext and allusions, and theological /paraenetic message of the Qurʾan, and with the role afforded to this place in the Qurʾan’s statements of ritual laws, and by its expectation that the main events of the eschaton would take place within the Jerusalem landscape.
In the course of presenting the arguments for the Jerusalem thesis the following propositions are also advanced.
Adopting Daniel A. Beck’s identification of a strand of anti-Sasanian polemic in the Qurʾan’s early surahs, Surahs 83 and 105-106 were composed to offer encouragement to the defenders of the Temple Mount during a Jewish-led attempt to restore worship there in 614.
Q.17.1, which is traditionally interpreted as referring to a fantastic ‘night journey’ to Jerusalem, in fact seeks to put a positive interpretation upon the Qurʾan’s principal author having been forced to flee Jerusalem when the 614 temple-restoration project failed.
Reconciling diverse seventh century sources that refer to a contemporary Arab political and/or religious leader called ‘Mḥmṭ’, the Qurʾan’s principal author, adopting the name of ‘Maḥamad’, assumed leadership, of an Arab confederacy in northern Mesopotamia in 621, to be succeeded by Abu Bakr in 628.
The title of ‘Maḥamad’ recalls both ‘ḥamudot', the form by which a celestial messenger addresses the anonymous author-prophet of the Book of Daniel (a text with which the Qurʾan has much in common) and also ‘maḥamad’ and ‘maḥamadim’, words that are used in the Book of Ezekiel and the Song of Songs respectively to allude to the destroyed, but longed-for, Jerusalem temple.
The Qurʾan necessarily implies a substantially amendment to the biblical account of the testing of Abraham and the genealogy of the patriarchs in such a way that in the revised version:
Abraham carried out the lethal sacrifice of his son Isaac,
Ishmael was present at the scene and a party in his own right to the covenant that Abraham made with God for the benefit of their descendants (i.e. Abraham’s bloodline through Ishmael), and
Jacob, from whom the rebellious children of Israel were descended, was a third son of Abraham, rather than Abraham’s grandson though Isaac (per Genesis).
Adopting Stephen J. Shoemaker’s thesis that the principal author of the Qurʾan led an invasion of Palestine in the 630s, the verses in Surahs 2 and 22 in which the Qurʾan’s audience is exhorted to expel its enemies from whence the audience has itself previously been expelled were composed to support this campaign; which campaign was presented as an imitation of the Israelites entering Canaan in biblical times and the fulfilment of Ishmael’s oath to God to purify God’s House.
Quranic references to its audience inheriting the homes of the ‘people of scripture’, relate not to the besieging of certain specific Jewish compounds as recounted in the traditional Islamic narrative, but more generally to the Quranic community seizing control of the Holy Land.
The Qur’an’s late inclusion of Jesus into its scheme of sacred history was motivated by a pragmatic need to accommodate the continuing existence of Christian communities in the land that the Quranic community was capturing.
Adopting Shoemaker’s conclusions that the Qurʾan’s principal author was in occupation of the Church of the Kathisma, just three miles from Jerusalem, which influenced the Qurʾan’s Jesus nativity account, but he died before the city fell, Surah 9 was composed/compiled by his supporters after the death oftheir prophet, explaining why this surah alone lacks an introductory basmala asserting that what follows is announced ‘in the name of God.’
The early Qur’an-reading community’s focus upon Jerusalem rather than any shrine in the Hijaz is preserved in post-Qur’an accounts of building activity upon Temple Mount, early conquest coinage, reverential epithets for Jerusalem and superlative statements in the early Islamic tradition of Jerusalem’s spiritual importance to mankind.
